A political battle started brewing in the upstate this week after the Greenville Tea Party targeted Sen. Larry Martin, R-Pickens, for criticism over his voting record.

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The group handed out hundreds of flyers in Martin's district Saturday morning, which showed a scorecard of upstate Republican lawmakers' votes on issues the group deemed important to conservatives.

The score card gave Martin an "F."

"He's very likeable, but he has become a part of the problem and that is runaway spending in South Carolina," said Don Rogers of the Greenville Tea Party.

Martin, one of the most senior members of the General Assembly, dismissed group as being out of touch with voters in his district.

"They just have a different take on what conservatism is. They want essentially no government, no investment in jobs or economic development," Martin said.

The scorecard criticized Martin's vote in favor of a deal to bring to the state a distribution center for Amazon.com, which created more than 1,000 jobs. It also condemned his vote in favor of the I-95 Corridor Authority.

"What that means is the lawmakers get together and decide what businesses they want to favor and how they want to attract them," Rogers said.

The group also criticized Martin's vote to use some of the funds from a $100 million budget windfall to fund public schools, instead of returning the money to taxpayers.

"They wanted it all, and frankly we just couldn't do that with public education suffering the way it has on the base student cost," Martin said.

Earlier in the week, Martin released an ad on W-O-R-D radio responding to the tea party's claims.

The Greenville Tea Party's scorecard graded 38 Republican legislators from the upstate on their voting records. Twenty-two of the lawmakers were given "F's," while just five were given "A's."